[1993] was also the year Marvel Comics took advantage of that hunger for event storytelling and unleashed “Maximum Carnage,” a tale told weekly across all the Spider-Man titles that at the time was the biggest Spidey crossover event ever. It was the brainchild of editor Danny Fingeroth, who oversaw the growing roster of Spider-Man books the company published.

[…]Spider-Man teams with his mortal enemy Venom (a man and an alien symbiote bonded over their hatred of the wall-crawler) to fight Carnage — himself an alien symbiote who joined with serial killer Cletus Kasady. After escaping from a mental institution, Carnage assembles a team of supervillain acolytes, and they paint the town red, killing dozens of innocent people as Spider-Man and his own team of uneasy rivals track them down.

[…]

“Maximum Carnage” would expand beyond 14 comic book issues to include a popular video game (Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage), action figures and a theme park exhibition at Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Florida. It got so big that even Marvel Comics’ top talent to this day is fuzzy on how it blew up beyond their comics.